End of the School Year!

Posted on July 4, 2014 by frenchimmersion

If you were thinking that it’s been a long time since my last post, you’d be right! The school year since March took on a kind of frenetic energy, and, for that matter looks to continue for few more days yet!

Today, the primary school kids that usually hurtle out of the school gates were in an excitable state but keen to linger for their last moments of junior school. I became camera woman taking the inevitable last moment snapshots. It’s moments like this that remind you that you are inescapably in France. The school, a typically “Madeline style” old brick and silex house, with large front courtyard playground and tall metal gates was overflowing with children this afternoon all saying their fond farewells to their “maitresses”. For primary school teachers to kiss their pupils is common, and today the children queued in long lines to wait to have their hands shaked and their cheeks kissed before making their way out onto the street, mindful that next year they would be in Collège. Anywhere else such displays of affection between staff and pupils would be abuse litigation possibilities!

Collègians and Lycéens finished school two weeks ago, after a flurry of exams. Unlike the UK, results for state exams are published only a month after being taken. The adolescents can relax into their holidays without anxiety hanging around them for the summer. Tonight I watch my older two prepare for the huge open air concert on the Rouen Quayside. The campbeds are already laid out for visiting friends making use of our city centre location! Following the success of last year when Mika played to a 60,000 strong audience, The city of Rouen has hosted another set of free concerts, tonight Martin Garrix takes over from the support bands at 11.30. It will be a late and noisy night!

The city will be buzzing through till July the 14th with masses of tourists joining the local population to watch the fireworks at the end of the French national holiday commonly known as Bastile Day. From that moment onwards, the local population winds down in preparation for the real French national holiday- the month of August!

Another school year is over. The school reports are in, and I’m a proud parent. Two of my children have averages of 19/20 in French. I have to record the fact because I am often asked if it is possible, and it’s a great moment when you realise that it is. I stuck my neck out this year and registered at university to study French, mindful of the ever growing gap between my children’s expertise and my faltering one. To date, it’s the best thing that i’ve done in France. I am over the moon to say that I passed the B2 diploma. At some moments there were doubts, without question there were frustrations and it certainly wasn’t a breeze, but speaking and writing the language with confidence creates opportunities, and opens up friendships and job possibilities. I am poised for the next diploma, the DALF C1, and all the amusement that it will hold for my children as I study along-side them next year!

But until that moment I can say only one thing:

Bienvenue à l’été!

And A Bird Pooped On My Head!

Posted on September 10, 2013 by frenchimmersion

A great friend of mine asked, at the begining of the summer how I would feel about house-sitting her mini chateau in return for caring for her elderly and ailing dog. After a year in a appartment, albeit a lovely one, the lure of a garden, a tennis court and an orchard was extremely appealing. No suprises that I said yes.

Thus began days of endless summer in wonderful Normandy surroundings, a bit of tuning of basic tennis skills and visits to the orchard to harvest the fruit to make jam, and find unripe pears as doggy-treats for a pear-loving dog!

The beauty of the chateau was that it is close enough to Rouen to continue working, and so it was that I could honour all my tour dates and guide an endless stream of Japanese and American tourists through the historic streets of Rouen.

One of the basic issues with guiding is what to do with personal effects. More often than not, the tour group arrive in Rouen by boat, down on the quayside. While those tours are always aided by microphone, the general indignity is having to carry a brightly coloured lollipop with the ship’s name blazoned across it in order not to loose the odd tourist along the way. On inclement days, the necessity to hold an umbrella claims the other free hand, leaving none with which to point to aspects of historic or aesthetic value. It’s not suprising then that I choose to descend to the ‘rendez-vous’ with nothing in my hands.

Leaving from the chateau early one morning on a hot sunny day it occurred to me that I had rather less pockets than usual. With my keys stuffed in one pocket, there was barely room for a hanky in the other. I deliberated a few moments on the need for a hanky on such a warm day, but having a sniffy nose and presenting a monument in front of thirty or so people are not good bedfellows. The hanky stayed.

The Parvis in front of the cathedral and the Bureau de Tourism has a lovely shady seating area under two rows of plane trees. Taking advantage of the peace and quiet of the early hours of this sunday morning I took a seat to wait and to savour the beautiful morning before the arrival of the group when suddenly – quite without warning..

…a bird pooped on my head!

After the initial horror, I felt up to the hairline of my forehead to feel copious quantities of slime slowly oozing their way onto my face. The next few minutes were a hasty attempt to restore my appearance and calm without mirror, and with only one solitary paper tissue to hand. The doors of the Bureau de Tourisme remained resolutely shut at this hour of a sunday morning!

It’s three weeks later now, the school year has begun, and once more the city plays host to the late summer arrival of a multitude of American and Australian tourists. Looking at the sky this morning, I deliberated on leaving my umbrella behind. After a weekend of 30° weather it seemed unneccessary that it encumber my day. At the last minute I swung it onto my arm and set out.

No more than three seconds into welcoming my group from their tour host and about one nano-second before I invited the crowd to move across the Parvis into the centre of the square, there came a shriek from one of the ladies at the back. If I thought I had been inundated with bird poop three weeks earlier, it was nothing on this poor woman. The rogue bird had managed to cover her hair, face and an extensive portion of her blouse. The tour ground to a complete standstill and the shocked victim was rushed off to the Bureau de Tourisme to repair the damage. Thankfully it was monday, and the Bureau was open, a significant improvement on my experience. Five minutes later she rejoined us in good spirits ready to get going.

It was less than five minutes later, from an apparently clear sky that I felt the first spots of rain. The speed with which the clouds followed, and the skies darkened beggered belief, but only moments later the heavens opened to torrents of rain. Three quarters of the group were umbrella-less, but generally good-humoured and optimistic that it would be shortlived.

It was not.

By the Eglise St Maclou, in all its fine new stone-cleaned whiteness, the drips were dripping down the necks of the unprotected crowd, and we hastily pressed ourselves under a small roof overhang to keep out of the worst of it.

By the Aitre St Maclou, the tour groups had bunched up, all trying in vain to shelter under the archway access point. It was a devil of a job not to loose Americans to the German group, and welcome some Russians to ours as we started to disentangle and move on to our respective destinations. One lone couple of elderly Canadians had completely lost sight of their group – and may even now still be wandering the rainy streets!

By the Passage des Chanoines, with clothes now drenched to the skin, the more miserable of the un-umbrella’d group pleaded with me to take them back to their bus.

“Unfortunately” I said, “the very nature of inner city parking in Rouen is such that where you were dropped off is not where you will be picked up – we will, unfortunately have to make our way to the meeting point at the other end of the city”

As you can imagine, the sense of humour, so abundent at the start was rapidly begining to diminish from a small quantity of the group.

We made our way, ducking and dodging between short arcades, doorways and cafe canopés to the Vieux Marché and the site of Joan of Arc’s death from burning at the stake. To add insult to indignity, an open overhead spigot-gutter shot a spout of water over the more unwary, until finally the sight of the tour operator came into view, hair wet and plastered to his head, and we headed off to the bus. One woman stepped into a huge puddle on the kerbside, but didn’t appear to notice, the rest, forewarned by me of it’s existance hardly seemed to care.. they were wet enough already.

Once home I looked down at my jeans, sodden to the knee, and mused that if any advice could be given to any tourist, or tour guide (for that matter) about to embark on a guided tour – it is this…

Don’t forget an umbrella regardless of the forcast ..

and for heavens sake, …more than one tissue!

Madness in Rouen

Posted on June 13, 2013 by frenchimmersion

It really is madness in Rouen this week. On strict instructions from Tuesday’s tour operator I dutifully arrived at the Vieux Marché to show my group of thirty tourists the Vitraux (stained glass) rescued from St Vincent church during World War One to find a snaking queue in both directions through main entrance door.

“It’s not necessary to pay for entry” I said, as the well-dressed beggar on the door was doing a roaring trade with the unsuspecting Americans!

I wished I could have left out the stained glass and shown something more obscure and less stampeded; there were plenty of places I hadn’t had time to show them.

There are approximately 40 guides in Rouen, and over the last few weeks I have turned up to the river cruise ships to find guides who have been drafted in from Paris to help cater for demand. Some of them had had to rise at 4am to arrive on time. I am glad of my cosy apartment a second away from the centre.

Last night I cursed as the sounds of music came beating through my windows, thinking that once again the students in the neighbourhood were partying and it would be a night ‘thin’ on sleep, but pulled open the huge windows nevertheless to water the Geraniums hanging off my balconies, when I realised, with a start, that this wasn’t any old music…..

“Our House” was definitely playing at top volume, buffeted by the wind in my direction. And of course I should have known. My teenage son had headed off with a friend to listen to Madness on the quayside, a good 40 minute walk away, and I’d been relegated to babysitting. But now I had a perfect seat with the windows wide open to hear an hour and a half of Madness live performance, sadly without the visuals.. but we can’t have everything!

Every so often “Husband à l’Etranger” and I have raved about the cult pop groups of our time, only for our kids eyes to glaze over – “mum you are SO old”. Last night my son eventually returned, converted, having managed to get himself five rows from the stage, and having videod entire songs on his phone. How could I have ever thought that mobile phones for teenagers were evil!

Thankfully the organisers were handing out earplugs to the crowd, of which, according to no1 son, there were thousands. Tonight he’s off again to hear ‘Pony Pony Run Run’ – now there’s a band that is definitely not of my time! But what the city is gearing up for is Friday night’s concert of “Mika”. Superbly popular in France, this will draw thousands, including me and my two younger ones, not necessarily because he is to everyone’s taste, but because his songs are internationally known and because Mika is bilingual French/English which adds to his fan-pulling capability in France.

So there you are, Rouen has drawn in the crowds, not only with the Armada ships, but also with these great free live open-air concerts.

It was madness, there has been Madness, and it still is madness, and will be until Sunday…

when the ships set sail once again and head for open sea. And then?

Well Rouen still has something to Impression you with,

But more about that later!

C’est Adam et Yves, Monsieur! – Becoming a Tour Guide.

Posted on April 19, 2013 by frenchimmersion

About two years ago, in total naivety, I popped into the Bureau de Tourisme to see if they ‘had a job going’. The women behind their desks peered at me as if I had just landed from a different planet (which indeed I just had) and sent me packing, and I spent the rest of the evening thinking how dreadfully rude they were.

Two years on I see their point!

This January, a few curious jobs later, the door of the Bureau de Tourisme inched itself open just a little bit as I managed to get a place on the ‘Formation Guide Conferencier’ having quite by chance made a second tentative the day the Bureau had started recruiting. If I had had any inkling what I was about to put myself through, perhaps I wouldn’t have been so keen. But that’s niavity for you.

So it was that I turned up for an intensive three month lecture series, spending the worst part of the sub zero winter temperatures shivering in freezing monuments, led by two lecturers who can only be described as walking ‘Masterminds’ who spent a good proportion of their time, when not delivering the essentials, embellishing miniscule details and corroborating, or disputing each others event dating down to the sheerest milli-second. Clearly this level of detail was ridiculous…

Or was it?

Curiously, over the space of three months, the thirst for linking each historical event and ancient monument became almost unquenchable. The fact that the canons at the cathedral became so irritated by the merchants at the herb market in the cathedral square for using the cathedral as a meeting house when it rained that they demanded the markets relocation, which in turn lead to the location of the future Palais de Justice on the same site in 1499. Equally interesting was the fact that the wife of King Charles the Mad held, in 1393, a fancy dress party for him as a distraction from government, in which all the men wore feathered costumes heavily impregnated with highly flammable glue. The Queen’s lover, the Duke of Orléans turned up with a candle, and all the costumed guests, with the exception of the king, burned to death. I am not sure, however that that was the queen’s plan! Who was she? She was the woman that handed the French throne to the descendent of the English crown, which in turn led to the arrival of Joan of Arc.

“Do not”, said our lecturers,” make an error on dates”. Dates, if anyone has not yet tried them in a foreign language, are hellish. Then followed a discussion on how the Germans, in order to route out foriegners and spies, would deliberately lead the conversation around dates, where the unwary would inevitably blunder. If the accent didn’t give me away first, clearly the dates would!

The trouble with the history of Normandy is that the English just didn’t know when to leave. In practically every epoch, or so it seems, the throne of England and the Duchy of Normandy were held by the same man – and more often than not the English king had designs on the French throne. Clearly the English were not very good at throwing in the towel and returning home, however much more simple that would have made the revision process for me.

Clearly I have more English genes than I had anticipated, for even when the crowd of suited Directors of Tourisme and Directors of Normandie Patrimonie headed for me on Tuesday morning; when I should have seen their approach and run off down the road screaming in terror, I stood resolute, nurturing my limited vocabulary, ready to give my very best shot.

Part of the exam process had been to select a little blue envelope from the pile of 20 or so on the table. Good fortune was shining on me when I opened mine to discover the coveted ‘Aitre St Maclou, the macarbre Black Death cemetery’. Twenty minutes of preparation and we were at the location ready to begin the presentation.

Not to be deterred by the black suits, I led ‘Le Direction’ into an obscure corner of the cemetery to show them one of the few carvings that had survived the anti-iconographic destruction of the Wars of Religeon.

“Note the exceptional carving of Eve, tempted by the serpent” I said.

“Yves?” said Monsieur Le Direction, looking bewildered,

A hasty discussion ensued amongst the Direction, clearly concerned that Paradise had been inhabited by Adam and Yves, before Monsieur Patrimoine managed to clarify that it was an error of pronunciation,

“Ehv” he reassured.

When we moved on, Monsieur Patrimoine was clearly tempted to look at the statue of the murder of Cain and Abel, despite being very mutilated in the Wars of Religeon and in its very undignified position almost in the toilet, where-upon Madamoiselle Patrimoine expressed more than a passing interest in the location of the toilets. I rather suspect she went back there afterwards!

Twenty minutes later it was time to wrap up.

“The cemetery is now on the list of….” but my brain was weary and could no longer recall the translation for ‘Historic Monuments’.

“Monuments Historiques” filled in Monsieur Le Direction, and my lecturer squeezed me a sympathetic smile.

I left the monument gutted at my linguistic inadequacy, sure of failure.

But a long five hours later an email popped into my in-box from the Direction.

“J’ai le plaisir de vous informer que vous avez réussi votre test en français ce matin”

“I have the pleasure to inform you that you have passed your test in French this morning”

The door of the Bureau de Tourisme is open wide. Their office is my office; I am now an official ‘Guide Conferenciére de Rouen’. There has been gain from the pain!

It was nearly the death of me!

So to all planning a visit to Rouen –

Bienvenue!

L’Aître St Maclou and Getting Cold Feet.

Posted on March 18, 2013 by frenchimmersion

I have just returned home after two hours in the pouring rain and bitter cold. We are now in our tenth week of training for ‘Conferencier de Rouen’ and have 20 centuries of French and Norman history under our belt, and eleven edifices at our fingertips. Or we would like to think so!

There is nothing more demoralising than feeling ‘au fait’ with an edifice, or an epoque of history, than hearing the lecturer rattle of the dates in French, and not being absolutely sure that it was the corresponding date in ones own memory – specifically because having translated the date into English, the lecturer has already passed onto another great moment of history, leaving you in the dark as to what he was referring to!

I had a bitter internal struggle this morning as to whether I should leave my umbrella at home in order to have my hands free for note-taking or whether to just listen and consequently remain dry. Our lecturers have so much information stored in their incredible brains, that leaving the note pad behind really wasn’t an option. In the end I huddled under two hoods and got soaked, the two hoods doing nothing to aid comprehension or ability to hear!

Rouen is incredibly lucky historically to have one of the only two ‘Aîtres’ in France. The other, the Aître de Brisgaret is found at Montivilliers near Le Havre. The Aître St Maclou is found in the Martainville area of Rouen.

One must first imagine the city in the medieval age, a city with several fine stone public buildings, the cathedral and the Palais de Justice, to name but two, surrounded by the sinuous and tortuous alleys and streets of timber-framed houses with compacted earth roads and overhanging ‘encorbellements’, vertically narrowing the street and preventing the movement of air and light. To this underbelly, one must add the Normandy climate and incessant rain (!), the mud and the effluent. The sector Martainville was initially the land immediately outside the city’s fortified walls. It was area trapped between two rivers, the Robec, which ran alongside the city ramparts, and the Aubette which ran at the base of the cliffs that surround the town. The area was marshland, frequently flooded by the Robec to north and west, the Aubette, to the east and the Seine to the south. Into this landscape came the industrialists, keen to tap the water to power their mills for the textile trade. And with the trades came the ever increasing number of workers, densifying the built environment with unregulated building, unchecked effluent and high mortality rate.

The increase in industry and the necessity to trade brought with it a route for the highly contageous ‘Black Death’ or ‘Peste’ as it is known in France. The first swathe in 1348 decimated the population and the cemeteries became full. The ‘Hundred years War’ which began in 1345 and continued as a battle over territory weakened resistance to the ‘Peste’. This, combined with the need for high taxation to pay for the war effort, the shortages of grain from famine and lack of cultivation of farmland created misery. Into this misery came the need to construct a new cemetery to cope with the soaring death rate.

The Aître St Maclou, so named after its resemblance to a Roman atrium, began initially in 1357 as a field, to which over the years to follow additional plots were added. In 1520 the gallery was built around three sides of the perimeter of the field, ostensibly to allow the richer residents of the quartier not to be interred in the ‘fosse commun’ or communal grave but at the edge where little chapels were available for visitors. The demand for space in the common grave became so high that it became necessary to interr the corpses with a caustic cement powder, (a bi-product from construction) to speed the decomposition. The Fosse or grave was worked with such a system that the skeletons could be exhumed without disturbing those still decomposing, and the bones laid to rest in an ‘ossuaire’, an open upper gallery of the building, thus leaving space for new buriels. Suffice to say, the job as grave digger was not only unpleasant but had a high turnover, as each in turn inevitably succumbed to the daily contact with the contagion!

The Aître has its own very particular atmosphere. It was built at a turning point in attitudes towards death and one senses a particular type of menace, reinforced by the incredible carving to both the timber structure, and the stone columns. The timber is heavily worked with representations of death. Skulls, bones, spades and coffins are carved on the horizontal beams, whilst the stone carvings carry grotesque scenes from the ‘Danse Macabre’. If all that does not adequately convey the ‘raison d’être’ of this remarkable building, perhaps the mummified cat built into the wall of the newer southern ‘wing’ will do the trick…

But i’ll leave that for you to find!

In the meantime, my exam is fast approaching; a twenty minute oral on one of the 16 edifices or sectors of Rouen, randomly chosen on the day by my examiners….

…and I’m getting cold feet!